Addicted to Food? The New Research Suggests It’s Possible.

Like most recovering addicts, Kay Sheppard has a testimony. Hers is this: the Florida mother of two spent years making trips to the store to buy cookies and chips for her family, eating almost every bag and box in the car on the way home. Then came the year she bought her dad chocolates for Christmas. She stuffed the candy in her dresser drawer and later finished off the entire thing—repeating this cycle five times with five boxes of candy. One day, she spied herself eating in the mirror and was horrified. “That was the first time in my 30-some years that I ever thought what I was doing was abnormal, because I had done the same thing year after year after year,” she says.